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Elliot–as I just commented over on Frank’s blog as well, that’s going to be a tough one.

You might want to consider the next-best extension when it comes to US cities (since so many of the actual city government sites are .org’s; which is where many/most people expect the “official” city site to in any case be).

We’ve got Glendora.org; a nice city w/great demographics and psychographics in L.A. County; which we’ll let go for just 25k; price good for the remainder of 2007.

We have 2 other California cities in negotiaitions for leases right now.
Traditional modes of thought are changing towards “intuitive phrases” like “IamThis.com” & “WeAreThat.com”. They hold tremendous marketing potential from the end-user’s standpoint. We are also in negotiations over 4 other product brand oriented names going to the end user. After all, if the “Iam/WeAre” concept in “WeAreDiamonds.com” is good enough for DeBeers, isn’t it good enough for the rest of us?
Thanks,
Stephen

Have you had any bites? $50k for a domain of a city 50k plus… Shoot, that would be a DEAL! Another local city domain name (.com of course) was purchased for $50k nearly 10 years ago!!! Our city domain name generates your top offered amount through basic marketing and not even optimized. Thoughts or am I the crazy one? What do you think about AssociatedCities.com, I am sure that they found this article interesting.

***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***

Panama City is great. I was able to acquire Lowell.com – population 105,000. It’s the 4th largest city in Massachusetts. I’ve been chronicling the development on my blog. I intend to join Associated Cities. I think they have a great organization.

I have cityofelcajon.com, ElCajon is in San Diego County
and has a population of 95,460 (2000 census)here is the linkhttp://www.ci.el-cajon.ca.us/about/
It is a very well known city, let me know if you are interested?

I don’t believe East Oakland is actually a city as my post requested… from Wikipedia:“East Oakland is the southeastern portion of Oakland, California, and takes up the largest portion of the city’s land area. It stretches between Lake Merritt in the northwest and San Leandro in the southeast. Many areas of East Oakland have been plagued by high crime in the postwar period and are known for violence and drug activity”

Dear Eliot, someone thinks cityofX.com is valuable as you wrote below. What’s the difference between one domain that covers nine million citizens and 300 domains that do?

The 300 bring in more interest with less competition. The one big domain has hundreds of similar domains giving similar information/ads while the 300 are unique. There are seven cityofmonroe.com cities in the USA and if content were provided on that domain that may very well be the only source of information about that city available in an easy to remember domain.

My 300 cover nine million citizens and about a thousand cities, mostly small towns and cities in the USA. cityofmontreal.com and a few other foreign ones give much more.

Hit count is low because users usually put in the shortened version but with content and on search engines, the cityofX.com domains have the highest respect.

So you know anyone interested in establishing a political network of cities similar to Facebook? Instead of social, it would be political.

The article references CityOfMorehead.com, the official city website for a number of years.

According to the article, city officials seem to think “their website was stolen via ‘cyber squatting.’” I did a bit of research on the domain name, and according to a Whois search on the last archive date where the domain name was owned by the city, the domain name was set to expire on November 26, 2009. It appears to me as if the domain name was not renewed and someone else acquired it.

.

If the City of Morehead wishes to have this domain name back so they don’t have to order hundreds of dollars worth of stationery, they should hope the owner would want to sell it to them. Otherwise, they will be forced to use new email addresses, change all inbound links, and probably spend in excess of the $10,000 figure they quoted in the article. They now also need to worry about confidential emails addressed to @cityofmorehead.com email addresses.

I only like pure city .com names to develop. I think there is much more value to Morehead.com than CityOfMorehead.com – based on the domain value alone. In this case, since the city has been using and promoting the later, there is added value I suppose to the later of the two names. However, for my investments, I would only buy pure city .com domain names.

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